There are so many old threads on various artists, it is just making me more confused when I read through them. Here's my problem:

For the majority of my various artist compilations, I want each song artist in the artist list. Therefore, I have set compilations behavior to "List compilations under each artist." However, there are a handful which I want to appear under a common "Album Artist." I thought the "List albums by band" option would cause the Band/TPE2 tag to override whatever is in the track artist tag, but this does not appear to be the case.

Let me give you a few examples where I would find it useful to have a way to designate an "Album Artist" that overrides "Track Artist":

Example 1:
A CD called the "The Great Blues Men" is tagged with each artist for the songs. However, I only want to see "The Great Blues Men" in My artist list for this particular CD since I am not likely to be searching for these particular artists by name.

… but I want them all to appear under the "Album Artist" Dave Matthews.

Example 3:
A soundtrack where there is one primary album artist, but a handful of tracks feature another artist. I want this only to appear for the album artist.

Is it possible to get what I want in the latest Slimserver?

luga00

2005-10-28, 11:54

Dave, I do the exact opposite to you. The Album Artist for me is the artist for the whole album so I would categorise 'Hits of the 70's' for example, as the Album Artist and all individual contributing artists under 'Artist'. This is the way it works for WMP10 and for while is the way it worked for SS 6.2 although it seems to be broken again under 6.5 beta.
Luga

mattybain

2005-10-28, 12:25

I don't really want to hijack this thread but I thing it would be good to keep all the comments about various artists together and I also think that some of what I am experiencing has some impact on your issues.

I have been struggling big time with the compilation artist issue the "getting my Now 3,219 CD to appear as one single artist - Various Artists" issue. I struggled for a couple of days and surprsingly despite numerous posts no help was forthcoming.

However finally I have managed to do it. The answer was I-Tunes, installing this and using it to set the song info and setting it as part of a compilation actually works. I have no idea what tag this is changing as it has no effect on the view of Tag&Rename which I usually use for tagging.

I think then in conclusion that the whole TPE2/band/album artist tag, call it what you will, is not working, at least not for me and has no effect on the way my music is viewed no matter how many boxes I tick in my settings.

For example I have an album which has 12 tracks, 3 of these are tagged with an artist "Frank Black, Frank Black and The Catholics". The Band Artist is "Frank Black" and the other 9 tracks are just "Frank Black".

These songs appear under both "Frank Black" and also "Frank Black and The Catholics" for all settings. Under the group by Band I think it should just be "Frank Black".

Can anybody confirm this? I think this is why MeSue is getting the issues she is. I think if it did work then her tagging would produce the results she wants i.e viewing by album artist tag.

This has been very frustrating but once it is all sorted I will be updating the Wiki so other people are not so easily confused as me.

luga00

2005-10-28, 13:14

Oops, did I say 'Dave'.
I meant 'Sue' obviously.

Sorry Sue.
luga

MeSue

2005-10-28, 19:58

No problem luga… I knew what you meant. I'm not sure why you said you do the opposite of me, though. Sounds like what you do is what I want in my example #1. Both you and mattybain seem to be saying it used to work like that (album artist overrides artist) but it doesn't anymore? Is that it? Has anyone filed a bug report on it?

mattybain

2005-10-29, 07:06

By creating a small music library of 6 albums and reducing the scan time from about 1hr to about 1 minute I have managed to have a decent play at this Various Artists tagging issue.

The conclusion I have come to is that the Various Artists will correctly identify your album as a compilation if the artist name is different for the same album name and the album artists (TPE2) tag is empty. This is why it wasn't working before as I had "Various Artists" in this tag before, a relic from WMP10.

What I haven't tested it for (which I will) is what impact the composer tag has (I suspect nothing although there is a bug relating to this)or whether if the album artist = artist it makes a difference.

I also haven't got to the bottom of the Athlete/St Germain issue i.e. if different artists have the same album name but are in different folders will it be picked up as various artists or not.

On the other issue of the album artist overiding the artist when the appropriate ss setting is selected I have concluded that for 6.21 (and apparently 6.5b) this is broken and have raised a bug. No matter what I do it will only list by both artist and album artist and not just album artist.

Bug raised - http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2420

I will attach an example file to this bug as soon as I can get at my home server.

mattybain

2005-10-31, 16:14

As I thought the composer tag has no effect.

What I am seeing is inconsistent behaviour between MP3 and WMA files. For WMA the album artist has to be blank for it to be picked up by Various Artists but not for MP3's.

This means that if you have multiple track artists but only one Album artist for MP3's this will be picked up as a Various Artist compliation.

MeSue what sort of files are you having problems with?

Also if you only have various artists compilation it doesn't show any artists on the browse by artist view, not even the various artists label so it is possible to have 10 albums and 0 artists.

MeSue

2005-10-31, 16:35

Last night's nightly added support for Media Center's Album Artist tags. All I have are MP3s. I just did some tests and I'm still not getting what I want. I have "List compilations albums under each artist" and "list albums by band" selected under compilations.

When I go to browse albums, if there is an album artist for the album, then it shows:
"Album name" by "Album artist"

That's fine and good.

However, in the browse artist list, it is showing ALL the artists whether they are track artists or album artists.

I want the artist list to only show those track artists IF album artist is empty.

I never want to SS to try to figure out what is "various artists" and only want SS to go by what *I* have put in an "Album Artist" tag.

I'm still unclear as to whether what I am seeing is because something is broken, or if it's just not designed to do what I want.

I guess what I would like is another option, something like "Replace track artist with album artist when it exists."

mattybain

2005-11-01, 00:32

Yes I agree it still doesn't work like that even on last nights nightly (31-10). I still get the track artist and album artist appearing in the artist listing. When you say it added support for media center album artist is this the TPE2/ Band Orchestra tag? or is this another tag?

Dan suggested that you need to select show band/orchestra in the server settings - for me that makes no difference.

As you say it is impossible to know exactly how it is intended to work as there is no documentation available.

However what I would like and what I think it is supposed to be doing is exactly as you say - for albums where there is an album artist for there to be an option to display only by the album artist name.

This would also solve my Various Artists issues as they would all be tagged with Album Artist "Various Artist" and therefore only be picked up by this name.

To me this is much neater than the complex search that I think is currently going to determine which are compliation albums. It would also solve the same album name by multiple artist issue.

tass

2005-11-01, 06:05

I guess what I would like is another option, something like "Replace track artist with album artist when it exists."

This is exactly what I want, too. Or, alternatively, a "Browse Album Artist" option under the Browse Music menu like Windows Media Player has. This way you could look for the individual artist on the odd occassion you wanted to (which I still occassionally do), and still easily be able to browse by Album Artist.

Yes I know patches are welcome ;) I'll get onto it this weekend.

MeSue

2005-11-01, 08:59

When you say it added support for media center album artist is this the TPE2/ Band Orchestra tag? or is this another tag?
Media Center has it's own Album Artist tag that's separate from TPE2/Band.

Dan suggested that you need to select show band/orchestra in the server settings - for me that makes no difference.

Same here.

To me this is much neater than the complex search that I think is currently going to determine which are compliation albums. It would also solve the same album name by multiple artist issue.

Totally agree!

alternatively, a "Browse Album Artist" option under the Browse Music menu

That works for me, too, as long as it would still show the artist name if Album Artist is empty.